Saturday I did something unusual - I walked the entire wrecking yard while doing a preliminary recon for air filter boxes. Normally I go into the yard with a shopping list and just head to wherever I need to go. This time I had window-shopped on the internet for some boxes that looked like the right shape, however I ended up just using my eyeballs and roamed the whole yard.

First of all I have to comment about the fact that an alarming number of the vehicles had critter homes on the upstream side of the air filter. I took this to mean that either a lot of running vehicles have been "visited" by critters and are carrying around nuts, berries, and bedding material - or, that once a vehicle goes inop it doesn't take long for critters to move in.

After roaming and taking pictures of a few prospects, I left the yard and came back home to stare at the nose of the 944. I realize now that most of the air boxes that can feed a 4.0-ish liter motor are bigger than the space I was budgeting for. And very few OEM air boxes are squarish anymore. The ones that are tend to be on trucks/suvs. I think I am going to have to either change my plan and try to mount a large, squarish OEM air box under the front drivers headlight (behind the foglights) or, use the top/cover off an OEM airbox but custom fab the rest of the box below the cover so that it can integrate into the (small) area behind the headlight but up inside the engine bay.

Friday I went back to the yard and made my decision for an air filter box. I narrowed it down to these two.

So naturally I picked the larger one because it would be more difficult to find a way to stuff down between the front wheel and the headlight.

Brought it home, gave it a bath and quickly started shaving pieces off of both the 944 and my hours-old air box.

Here is a shot of it tucked into its approximate new orientation. It was a grand compromise between the wheel, the swing of the headlight mechanism and having its outlet flange pointing in the general direction of the engine throttle body intake.

It is going to be a real challenge to come up with an OEM-ish looking transition pipe that goes from circular on the filter box to oval on the engine side, while routing through that awkward triangle shaped passage between the headlight bracket and the hood hinge.

The MOAB (Mother of All Brackets). Shown here next to the original sketch that started to get my mind wrapped around how I was going to orient the air filter box into the 944. Also shown are the 3 rubber isolator mounts that came off some model of Jeep. They are really perfect for what I needed. I am still gloating over their discovery. The MOAB will eventually get riveted onto the side of the filter box. I'll need to wait on that until after I clean up the bracket and paint it.

A shot of the outlet after I clearanced the 944's headlight popup bracket to make some more room for a tube to come up out of there.

And later on there will be the obligatory more fab work on the plastic box to shave off the tip so it doesn't drag on things.

Back to the wrecking yard for some air duct raw materials. The tube on the top will probably become my fresh air inlet to the filter box. The one in the middle will end up being $6 I don't use and the one on the bottom was almost perfect for the connector section between the filter box and the Crammit's intake plenum.

So then it was time to shorten up the pipe and tack weld the joint on the inside. (Trying to keep things looking OEM on the outside.)

Things lined up well.

Tight but do-able through the headlight/hood hinge narrows.

Then came the fabrication of this odd shape (I think it qualifies as another BRACKET.) I will need to spend more time on this later and try to make it purdy so as to attempt to resemble OEM.

Next up is deciding where to route the air inlet snorkle/snout. Choice A is behind the chin valence but in front of the radiator. Choice B up behind the front bumper. Choice C is to snake it up inside the top of the left front fender. Any suggestions?

I do live in California and am not aware of the aftermarket (but CARB legal) filter you speak of. I found a guy near me who has swapped several LS v8's into various cars for various clients and he has been through the BAR referee thing several times. His advice to me was "keep the air intake system as stock as possible. They (the refs) seem to spend a lot more attention on this aspect of the swap than other items". So that is what I'm trying to do - keep it as stock as possible.

Any of the K&N FIPK's are CARB legal, as are many of the other large manufacturer intake systems. Find the one that matches the engine you've swapped in, install it and slap the CARB EO sticker on the header panel. There, done.

I'm in Colorado, but when I did the LS swap into my 951 I bought a used K&N FIPK intake kit from LS1Tech, installed it directly on my car, had a CARB EO# for the intake and it would've been just fine for BAR in California...

They're only hot air intakes if you put them into hot air. My 951 had the intake underneath the header panel, where the intercooler used to live. Not hot air.

My current M3 has a Dinan intake, filter isn't in the engine bay at all. Not hot air. I've put hundreds of thousands of miles on engines with K&N air filters in them. Yeah, a paper filter may filter better, but the delta isn't enough that running a K&N is going to dramatically lessen the lifetime of your motor.

No reason to reinvent the wheel here, a nice intake will work well, be CARB certified and probably raise less eyebrows from the BAR referree than the janky "stock" airbox he's building now. The referree will know that an airbox hanging off of odd plumbing down near the wheel well isn't stock for that motor.... Just saying...

I'm a little amused. The car is way cool to me BECAUSE of the unorthodox decisions being made. The fabrication and thoroughness are top notch, and given the other projects taken on by the O.P., the result should be cool. This is not intended as a flame.

Fire Marshall Bill says that route A is too low to the ground and has the risk of ingesting water. Route C would be cool and mimics what some OEM’s do. But will require even more fab work. So he’s suggesting route B would probably work well. Getting air from behind the front bumper.

Friday it was back to the wrecking yard to harvest 2 bits of technology: a power steering reservoir and a coolant expansion tank. I figured the import section of the yard would be the best place to go for both variety of choices and for compact sizes. I had a very enjoyable 2 hours. Almost immediately I noticed that many brands of power steering tanks leaked badly. An unexpected benefit of shopping in the yard is that you get to see how stuff does or does not survive over time. I also noticed that most of the Japanese brands did not have what I considered a "manly" cap on their tank.

Early on I found a Jag power steering tank that I liked for size, location of ports and manliness of cap. But the mounting points were a little weird. However I removed it to carry with me and kept strolling the aisles. Next I started liking some Volvo coolant tanks and then started liking that they had side-by-side coolant/power steering tanks. So I voted the Jag tank off the island and started carrying around the Volvo stuff. But then I hit the VW Jetta/Golf style coolant tanks which look like cute little spheres - kind of like a hi-tech cannon ball. And they have a high manly factor to their caps. So now there is a Jetta with some Volvo tanks sitting in it's engine bay as I got rid of the Volvo stuff and started carrying around my little German sphere of expansion.

Since there are a lot of VW Jetta/Golf vehicles in the yard I started experiencing sphere snobbery - where I kept finding different tanks that were in better shape than the last one. I became really good at plucking them out of cars. But I still had not found the ideal power steering tank until... (sound of angels singing)... I came across a Hyundai model with a freaking gold mine. Compact tank. Manly cap. Easy to access and remove. Equipped with a mounting bracket and rubber isolators!!! (Sparkydog thrills easily.) I was ready to leave at this point but thought I should finish walking the remainder of the import section. And on the last row with about 6 vehicles to go - bam(!) - another VW with another sphere of cuteness and this one in the best shape of them all.

Here they are back at my lair.

I'm a little concerned that the VW sphere may not be big enough for a V6 cooling system. But I have a plan B should the VW turn out too small. There are some nice Audi coolant tanks that are kidney shaped and probably have more volume. But for now it was time for....

I did some research on coolant tanks. This would be the research I should have done before going to the wrecking yard. I found a cool equation and some nice graphs on the web. The size of the expansion tank should be about .05x the amount of coolant in the system. The Crammit had about 13 quarts. No idea what Blitzkrieg has yet so that means 13 quarts. So .05x 13 = .65qts. Then came the web again and the formula for the volume of a sphere. Cutie sphere is about 6 inches in diameter. 113 cubic inches. Web again. 1.96 quarts.

So far so good. 1.96 is bigger than 0.65. I’ll go with the VW sphere for now and see how it does.

With all the BRACKETS I have been making lately and all the additional BRACKETS I still have to make - I realized I needed more attachment bolts. My favorite bolt are these flange headed M6 bolts that hide by the dozens behind the door panels on Grand Prixs. The door panels are easy to remove once you know how and the bolts are quickly transferred from where they hide to inside my pockets.

And another reason I was lurking around a Grand Prix was to harvest the washer fluid bottle. Once I offered it up to the 944 it was relatively painless to do a little trimming, add a couple of easy BRACKETS and use 3 of my little flanged headed M6 buddies.

The neck of the washer fluid bottle snaked nicely up between the 944 headlight and my hood hinge. But it was too long so I had to chop it down and re-weld the mouth. (Turns out the tank material is the same stuff that we use in a hot glue gun.)